DAMIEN HIRST’S DEATH DRIVE:
On the Post-Ironic Art of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst
Art is the closest you can get to
immortality
– Damien Hirst
Jeff Koons, Puppy (1992)
Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1992)
It could be argued that the current era in art began with two animals – Jeff
Koons’ dog and Damien Hirst’s shark. Before them, there is postmodernism, which is critical and in which there is a distance between art
and its subject matter. After them, there is what we might call the
contemporary, which is post-critical and in which there is no distance
between art and its subject matter. But in order to try to explain this
distinction, let us begin with Koons’ dog. Before making Puppy (1992),
Koons was best known for a series of works featuring basketballs, bar
equipment and vacuum cleaners. As one of the members of the
“simulationist” art movement of the 1980s, his work was understood to
be based on the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s critique of the
“sign”. Thus Haim Steinbach’s dolls and ceramics mounted on walls or
Koons’ vacuum cleaners housed in glass vitrines were spoken of by
critics as an analysis of the “charms with which Madison Avenue tempts
the American consumer”.1 In many ways, of course, these simulationists
were merely updating Warhol’s original parody of consumerism in his
Brillo Boxes (1963) and Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962). The absurdly
detailed descriptions of the various vacuum cleaners in Koons’ The New
(1980-6) – New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polisher, New Hoover
Convertible and New Shelton Wet/Dry Doubledecker – remind us of the
equally unnecessary proliferation of flavours in Warhol’s Campbell Soup
Cans.
Of course, the variety of different soups in Warhol and of vacuum
cleaners in Koons is intended as a commentary on the unchecked
production of marginally differentiated consumer items in advanced
capitalism. After all, who could really taste the difference between the
Green and Split Pea soups in the Campbell’s Soup range? And who
would really need a New Hoover Convertible as opposed to a New
Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polisher when cleaning their house? But, at the
same time, both series are also parodies of the same minute differences
being given such consequence in the evaluation of art. For are not the
aesthetic discriminations connoisseurs make between seemingly identical
works of art in the end just another form of product differentiation?
Indeed, the ultimate point made by both Warhol and Koons is the
absolute homology between the art market and the more general market:
aesthetic taste is reduced to consumer preference. But what, then, of the
work of art that points this out? Might it not, by making clear its own
implication within the system of commodities, somehow escape it? Might
not the work of art be an exception to that system of signs it otherwise
admits itself as belonging to?
These questions inaugurate the long agony of post-modernism, which
consists of the work of art being at once inside and outside of the
phenomenon it is analysing.2 Thus one could no sooner say of Warhol
that his work is a cynical attempt to sell art as a commodity than it would
be seen to be about the attempt to sell art as a commodity. We could no
sooner say of Koons that his work evidences the collapse of all aesthetic
distinctions than it would be seen to be about the collapse of all aesthetic
distinctions. And this logic runs all the way through that generation of
artists like Koons who first came to prominence in the 1980s. We would
say, for example, of the photographs of Cindy Sherman that they do not
replay the stereotypes of women in our culture but critically reframe
them. We would say of the appropriations of Sherrie Levine that they are
not part of the mythology of avant-gardism but distance us from it. We
would say of the paintings of Julian Schnabel that they do not repeat the
expressivist fallacy but undermine it. It is the logic of a generalised irony,
in which every aspect of the work of art (its subject matter, technique,
authorship) is treated not directly but as a kind of readymade, able to be
grasped from the beginning only through its reception and elaboration
within the history of art.
Koons’ Puppy breaks with all of this. The remarkable thing about it is
that, against all that was happening in the art world at the time, its content
and form were meant sincerely, with no attempt at authorial distance. It is
this that Koons himself emphasises about the work: “Puppy
communicates love, warmth and happiness to everyone. I created a
contemporary Sacred Heart of Jesus”.3 But it is just this lack of irony that
makes it so hard for art critics, whose only mode of meaning in art is a
kind of self-reflexive criticality, to take the work seriously. As one
prominent commentator has been quoted as saying: “I find his work
repulsive. It has no message”.4 And this absence of irony is also to be
seen in the series Koons completed the same year as Puppy, Made in
Heaven (1989-92). In Made in Heaven, Koons enacts a number of
pornographic tableaux with his then-wife Ilona Staller, culminating as is
typical of the genre with images of Koons’ penetration and ejaculation.
What we might say Koons stages there is the overcoming of irony, for
what defines hard-core pornography is that there is no faking it. In theory
at least, male erection and ejaculation cannot be done in two minds, with
that split or ambiguous intentionality that characterises post-modernism.
What we see with Koons’ orgasm, as it were, is the pure expression of
authorial subjectivity, with no aesthetic or conceptual second thoughts
behind it.
Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years (1990)
It is, to start with, this emphasis on the bodily that Hirst shares with
Koons. Like Koons, what Hirst pledges himself to over and over in his
work is the overcoming of the de facto state of all art today as readymade.
His real influences are not Duchamp and Warhol, but Beuys and Bacon.
Take, for instance, the work that first brought Hirst to critical attention, A
Thousand Years (1990). The installation is like Bacon, not only in the
concentrating power of the glass vitrines in which its drama takes place,
but also in its realisation of one of Bacon’s stated ambitions for his own
work. In his original 1975 interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon reveals
that one of the aims of his work is to create something that “leads a life
completely of its own”.5 It is this idea of a work of art always being in
transformation that explains one of Bacon’s better-known desires for his
painting: that it not be about anything – which he condemns as
“conveying through illustrating” – but that it actually be that thing –
which he describes as coming across “directly onto the nervous system”.6
And it is this effect of immediacy that Hirst seeks to bring about with the
rotting cow’s head, flies, insect-o-cutor and escape hatch of A Thousand
Years: an autonomous work of art that, once set in motion, remains out of
the artist’s control. It would be a work that not so much imitated nature as
was nature. To repeat a distinction much used in the history of
philosophy, it would be nature as process (natura naturans) and not
nature as finished product (natura naturata). Indeed, it would be in this
way too that Hirst would complete the ambition of Beuys (a
Frankenstein-like artist, if ever there was one): that of creating “artificial”
life through the putting together of different organic materials.
In fact, considered more closely, Koons’ and Hirst’s oeuvres reveals
themselves as opposites. In Koons, we have the desire for total authorial
control over the work and the direct connection of the artist with his
audience. This would be evidenced by the seamless finish of his
sculptures and the well-known story of him obsessively polishing the
glass vitrines of his vacuum cleaners every morning before the gallery
opened to remove all human traces. In Hirst, it is not so much the artist as
the work of art that communicates with the audience, and the final form
of his various objects is open, provisional, contingent (typical of Hirst’s
entire aesthetic in this regard would be the Spin Paintings of 1995).
Nevertheless, both artists do thereby break with the irony of postmodernism. Their work is not both inside and outside of what it
represents. There is no problem of authorial intentionality, insofar as it is
not about our interpretation of it. We see this in Hirst’s next major work,
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
(1991). It is, of course, tempting to see the piece as merely the latest in a
long line of readymades throughout the history of art, asking the question
of what it means to put a shark in an art gallery. But this shark goes
against the logic of the readymade on a number of levels. It is not the
contingent act of artistic selection that makes the work, like selecting one
out of a series of otherwise identical urinals. Rather, the shark is a unique
wild animal that is not selected but captured, and that in our culture
functions as the stuff of our worst nightmares, the very image of our own
individual and unsubstitutable death. In a way, like Koons’ use of hardcore pornography, Hirst here through the sheer physical presence of the
shark seeks to overcome all aesthetic, historical and conceptual mediation
and confront us directly with the thing itself. The work is not about the
gesture of putting a shark in an art gallery. On the contrary, Hirst uses the
gallery as an opportunity to confront us with this shark.
Damien Hirst, Mother and Child, Divided (1993)
But we might go further with The Physical Impossibility of Death. For
what connection might we draw between it and such early pieces as A
Thousand Years and the butterfly painting In and Out of Love (1991)?
And what would it and the famous vivisected animals and the later
religiously themed series like Romance in the Age of Uncertainty (2003)
and New Religion (2005) have in common? As we say, the shark is for us
the very image of death. It speaks not just of death’s subjective
impossibility for us who are alive, but also of its objective inevitability,
the fact that we all will die. And this is to say that, if the shark is a figure
of death, it is even more the embodiment of the death drive, that which
cannot be killed. (The paradox of Hirst’s work is that, even though the
shark is motionless and therefore dead – for a shark cannot breath if it
does not constantly move forward – it nevertheless appears so alive and
about to bite.) The death drive, in psychoanalysis, refers not so much to
any tendency towards the end of things as to its opposite: a kind of
undead excess, that which takes life beyond itself. It is what in the human
cannot be reduced to the biological cycle of birth and death: it is wasteful
and destructive but also spiritual and transcendent. It is at once the lowest
and the highest of human impulses.7 And it is precisely this – this excess
that stops life just being life – that Hirst is obsessively getting at in his
work. It is this death drive that is not only the immortality that Hirst seeks
to attain through his work but the immortality – again, the Bacon theme –
that Hirst attempts to create in his works.
It is from the perspective of the death drive that we might put together,
for example, Hirst’s series of vivisected animals like Mother and Child,
Divided (1993) and This Little Piggy (1996) and the later religious works.
These two series might at first appear opposed or the result of some
unresolved contradiction in Hirst’s aesthetic: the former material,
despiritualised, fallen, and the latter immaterial, spiritual and
transcendent. But, in fact, coming after the effort to create life in A
Thousand Years, the works involving the cutting-up of animals can be
understood as an attempt – almost like certain scenes in Sade – to locate
the soul, that “motor” of the creature not reducible to the flesh. Looking
at the various bodies’ internal organs laid out before us, we are struck by
the extraordinary beauty and complexity of what we see, which seems to
exceed any rational accounting or explanation. But, more than this, by a
kind of subtraction or reductio ad absurdum, Hirst is wanting to show
that the life of an animal is not to be mistaken for anything physical.
There is something there we cannot see, no matter how hard we look, like
that excess brought about in those otherwise “zero sum” games of A
Thousand Years and In and Out of Love. It would be the desire of the flies
to escape even though they risk death in A Thousand Years and it would
be the art or beauty that is left behind in In and Out of Love.8
In a piece like This Little Piggy, in which the two halves of the pig are
each in their own vitrine, incessantly sliding back and forth across each
other driven by an engine, there is at once an unending vivisection, a
cutting up of the body into finer and finer slices, and in this motion itself
a kind of inextinguishable life, almost as though the machine were being
powered by something inside the pig. The paradox of the work here, as
before, is that the attempt to find out where life originates necessarily
misses it. Or the reduction of life to the flesh itself produces its own
immaterial spirit. And it is in this light that we might think of Mother and
Child, Divided as enacting a kind of virgin birth, with the mother cow
able to multiply or reproduce even across glass. It is this excess too that
can be seen in the butterfly wing paintings (2002-6), where the resulting
patterns that are built up appear as something greater than any individual,
like some unconscious evolutionary goal or some chromosomal
programming that is passed on from generation to generation. And,
finally, it is this death drive that is evident in Hirst’s fascination with
cigarette smoking and cancer, for in both of these things there is a kind of
habit or disease that will outlive its host, that is more alive than the
person it occupies.9
Damien Hirst, St Sebastian, Exquisite Pain (2007)
In an apparently opposed register, it is this insight into the undead nature
of the death drive that allows us to understand properly such recent Hirst
series as Uncertainty in the Age of Romance and Beyond Belief (2007).
Crucial to the argument of Hirst’s religious works – something forgotten
by all New Age and liberal Christian denominations – is that the spirit is
indissociable from (the sufferings of) the flesh.10 When we look at the
metal spikes driven into the heart on the altar of New Religion or the
arrows in the young bull of St Sebastian, Exquisite Pain (2007), it is their
suffering that we also feel in our flesh. The profound enigma of the works
– again, what Bacon might mean by wishing the work to come across
“directly onto the nervous system” – is that something as immaterial as
pain can be transferred from body to body. There is an affect produced by
looking at the suffering of the Apostles in Hirst’s Romance in the Age of
Uncertainty that is the soul. In one way, as in the Bible, each prophet in
Hirst’s rendering is reduced to the particular bodily mortification that
they will undergo (St Thomas is speared, St Peter is crucified upside
down), but what Hirst shows us is that the human can never be reduced to
this. The equation he puts his faith in is that the more suffering the body
undergoes the more beautiful it is, the more it is reduced to the medical or
pharmacological the more its spirituality shines forth.
Damien Hirst, For the Love of God (2007)
This is the true “religious” dimension of Hirst’s work: that the spirit is not
to be grasped outside of its corporealisation but only in and through the
flesh. And this would be just as the mystery of the Incarnation tells us
that God is not to be understood as some supernatural deity but only ever
in the form of the man: Christ is merely that extra dimension already
within the human itself. Thus the dove of the Holy Spirit in Hirst’s A
Faint Hope Beyond the Fear of Death (2005) and The Incomplete Truth
(2007) appears not as something noumenal or transcendent lying behind
appearances, but rather as appearance itself, a momentary gathering or
condensation of the atmosphere. This is why Hirst’s work constantly flirts
with kitsch: because the supernumerary is never to be conceived outside
of the things of this world. And it is at this point, to conclude, that we
might turn to the last work of Hirst considered here: the diamond skull of
For the Love of God (2007). Obviously, the first point to note is that, like
Physical Impossibility, it is a work about death. The piece has been
compared to Western mementi mori or vanitas paintings and to Aztec or
Mexican reliquaries. The skull even has the same open eyes and terrifying
grin as the shark. But, more importantly, the presence of death serves to
cut off the transcendental dimension, to remind us that there is no other
world than this one. And yet, as we have seen throughout, it is this cutting
off of the transcendental dimension, the forgoing of any alternative to this
world, that liberates another dimension here on earth.11 For, in For The
Love of God, there is a miraculous and inexplicable shining forth that
gives the skull a kind of life and that, while it cannot be separated from
the diamonds with which it is covered, is not simply to be identified with
them. It is the same surplus or surplus value at stake in the idea of Hirst
selling For the Love of God for more than it cost to make (a muchpublicised fact that is very much part of the work). This excess is the art
of For the Love of God – and it is the very aura that hovers immaterially
over the skull like that last fading close-up of Hitchcock’s Psycho: that of
the imperishable “human” that fleshes out our bones, that lives on after
we do.
Rex Butler
Eleanor Heartney, ‘The Hot New Cool Art: Simulationism’, Art News 86, January 1987, p. 133.
One of the best essays written on post-modernism is still Wolfgang Max Faust’s ‘Du haste keiner
chance. Nutze sie! With It and Against It: Tendencies in Recent German Art’, Artforum, September
1981.
3
Jeff Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook, Thames and Hudson, London, 1992, p. 144.
4
Rosalind Krauss, cited in Sylvère Lotringer, ‘Immaculate Conceptualism’, Artscribe 90, FebruaryMarch 1992, p. 24.
5
David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson, London, 1997, p. 17.
6
Ibid, p. 18.
7
We are drawing here on the notion of the death drive recently developed by Slavoj Žižek, which
breaks with the biologism of Freud in his original treatment in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For an
example of Žižek’s argument, see The Sublime Object of Ideology: Enjoyment as a Political Principle
(Verso, London, 1989): “‘Death drive’ is not a biological fact but a notion indicating that the human
1
2
psychic apparatus is subordinated to a blind automation of repetition beyond pleasure-seeking, selfpreservation, the accordance between man and his milieu… ‘Death drive’ cannot be reduced to an
expression of alienated social conditions, there is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not
to ‘overcome’ it, to ‘abolish’ it, but to come to terms with it” (pp. 4-5).
8
We might ask, for instance, why Hirst calls his work A Thousand Years. The answer is that the title
refers not to the eternal life cycle of flies laying eggs and hatching but rather to the imperishable desire
of the flies to escape from this cycle altogether.
9
Similarly, we might think of the various Apostles being matched with a pill in New Religion: here too
the “after-life” being spoken of is the addiction to these sedatives and painkillers that lives on after we
do.
10
The real artistic comparison to make with Hirst would indeed be to someone like the Mel Gibson of
The Passion of the Christ.
11
For an excellent essay on this notion, see Joshua Delpech-Ramey, ‘The Idol as Icon: Andy Warhol’s
Material Faith’, Angelaki 12 (1), April 2007.